What have I become? Sitting in my attic tip-tap-tapping at this laptop, hunched over my keyboard, huddling against the cold. The dim lamplight and the glow from my screen; two hoodies cowling me, draping my eyes in front. I should be out in the world soaking up experience, not stuck here in my garret like some Dostoevskian hermit, moaning about how the world has conspired to leave me unable to summon the wit to get a bloody job. But one’s existential angst these days, unlike said hermit’s, may find release through such incongruous channels.
Indeed, if the death of literature had happened a century and a half before, instead of with the birth of the internet, would the world not be a poorer place if the ability to update his Facebook status with whichever ephemeral nonsense happened most recently to cross his angst-riddled mind had been available to that aforementioned Russian recluse? If any one of those individuals with whom he never passed the time of day when they were tenuously familiar years ago, but which his computer now told him were his “friends”, could have messaged to tell him to stop feeling so sorry for himself and go out instead and find himself a girlfriend, would literature not be that much more impoverished for it? Undoubtedly. But then again, are we not collectively now suffering the very same ills, if not more technologically induced and maybe even more acute?
We confine ourselves to lofts and bedrooms. We chain ourselves to mobiles and laptops. We ensnare ourselves and sleepwalk as we retreat “underground”. But what does it amount to?
Webcams, chat rooms, a virtual existence. Meaningful relationships subordinated to the wireless world. Yet it seems we’ve reached the point at which we can live no other way. If emails are not checked regularly, if texts or voice messages cannot be replied to, if our social networks cannot be accessed, our worlds – both virtual and actual – would fall apart before our glazed eyes, reduced to those few people still living in the age of the landline and those fewer that can be reached physically. Comments must be checked on blogs, refutations and reaction must be posted, the hermetic circle – with no relevance to anything beyond its bounds or any human reality save the internal effects it produces from those involved in its perpetuation – must be travelled round and round however futilely until the pointlessness that maintains it finds another host.
We wake up at nights with the sweats, subconsciously realising that since Dave is friends with Shelly and Shelly’s boyfriend is friends with Simon, if Steve writes something on her wall about it, Siobhan will realise Stacy didn’t invite her to her leaving do. We spend time on forums rather than in the pub. We feed our desires rather than our intellects. We read blogs instead of books; we post comments instead of letters; we spend so much time wanking, that should a genuine sexual opportunity come our way, all that it will likely produce is an string of mumbled excuses whilst sitting on the edge of the bed too embarrassed to make eye contact.
Craving isolation we escape into our screens. Leaping through the looking glass to a realm where anything is possible, where all tastes can be catered for, where everything can be made to bend towards your will. Perspectives become skewed; reality becomes something other than it was. The underground becomes the default; it becomes that which is most real. Alienated from direct human contact, from touch and gesture, emotion and empathy, we drive ourselves deeper underground. Emotional interaction becomes technologically mediated. Words become text. Relationships remain unfulfilled. Yet we are all complicit. We all partake in the charade, twining virtual and real, putting our faith in technology and the progress that propels it, believing it will see us through. But to where we cannot tell.
We strut around thinking we are all so high-tech, that we are so here and now, believing our own hype that we are ten years further down the line to where we want to be, that we forget that, with their moustaches and their bowler hats, they doubtless thought the same in ’29 before the Great Depression arrived to fuck the optimism of the roaring 20s quite royally in the jacksie for the best part of a decade. No doubt we will all be thinking the same next time the excrement hits the air conditioning – as we are all still deludedly thinking now - then lamenting how it could happen to us when online banking makes it so much easier to pay our over-estimated utility bills in full.
Nevertheless, the central heating shall not go on tonight. It is either that or miss a meal or two for a couple of days next week. But paying is the lesser of the two evils whose counterpart would see me frustrate myself to the point of delirium trying to navigate my way through the endless pressing of numbers, hashes and stars towards a being I can converse with only to come up again against the same bland bint reciting another dispiriting catalogue of pre-recorded options. Even if by some strange quirk of modernity I finally find myself confronted with the seemingly sentient voice of whichever underpaid operative of that outsourced customer service department deigns to raise the receiver to take my call, to attempt to articulate the injustice of the merciless sodomy committed against my person quarterly, would be a pursuit too soul destroying for words. Best then to lie back and think of a future that will no doubt prove even less real than the virtual present.
All hail progress!
All hail the Paradiso where we shall forever long to be!
